1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of conveying technology. It relates to a method for monitoring and/or controlling a transportation apparatus in accordance with the preamble of claim 1, to a transportation apparatus for carrying out the method in accordance with the preamble of claim 11, and to a clamp for detachably holding and transporting in accordance with the preamble of claim 21.
2. Discussion of Related Art
During the production of printed products such as newspapers, magazines, catalogues, brochures or the like, which need to be provided quickly and in large quantities, special handling and processing techniques and techniques of transportation between the individual handling and processing stations have been developed and become established in the past which are distinguished particularly by the high achievable capacities of 40 000 or even 80 000 copies per hour.
Examples of such techniques are known from the documents DE-A1-196 23 307, EP-A1-0 518 064, EP-A1-0 550 828, EP-A1-0 606 550, EP-A1-0 647 582, EP-A1-0 686 592, EP-A1-0 824 245, EP-B1-0 918 721, EP-0 961 188, WO-A1-2007/012206.
The flat printed products, which are handled by pleating, folding, stapling, placing inserts, inserting, sticking, conveying, cutting, gathering, for example, are transported in between the individual handling stations continuously at a suitable, often relatively high speed, usually in the form of an overlapped stream or in a manner held individually by clamps or grippers, are buffer-stored for gathering devices, for example, or are separated and channeled off.
It is often necessary to convey complex products and products with a large number of pages, that is to say thick products. The clamps used for conveying are subject to extreme loads at the high conveying capacities, given the clamping forces required for holding thick products, and given the closing and opening movements which frequently occur, so that faults may occasionally occur which are caused by a malfunction or permanent damage to a clamp or to a clamp portion. In the event of such a fault, it is necessary to establish as quickly as possible which clamp or clamps is (are) the cause of the fault in order to keep costly interruption times as short as possible and to allow rapid repair or correction of the fault.
Furthermore, on account of their high load in operation and their desired high operational reliability, the clamps are technologically demanding products which are made up from a multiplicity of accurately matched clamp portions whose interaction ensures the necessary reliability of the mechanics. It is therefore desirable for, in the event of a fault, a faulty clamp portion of a clamp to be replaced by a spare which, in terms of its manufacturing conditions, accurately matches the respective clamp and meets the high demands on the mechanical and other properties.
From the field of meat processing, it is known practice (U.S. Pat. No. 7,159,772 B2) to equip the carriages in a transportation system for carcasses with RF tags in order to achieve explicit storable and readable association between the respective carriage and the carcass hanging thereon. A comparable proposal is also made in U.S. Pat. No. 6,452,497 B1. On account of the large distances between the individual carriages (hooks) and the low transportation speeds owing to the size and weight of the carcasses, it is in this case possible for the tags to be read in and out without any problems at a static location.
It is also known practice to equip paper rolls (US-A1-2004/0102870) or printed product rolls (EP-A1-0 824 245) with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) element in order to mark the respective product and render it identifiable. In this case too, the transported product is in the foreground of the data transmission.
Finally, it is known practice (U.S. Pat. No. 7,118,029 B2) to render a container for surgical instruments and the content of the container identifiable by virtue of both container and the instruments themselves having RFID tags fitted which can be read directly or indirectly.